A woman came to me with a very sad and perplexing story shortly after I started practicing OB-GYN. She was in her late 30s and had 2 or 3 children. She told me that she had been raped at work in a janitorial closet, after all the other staff had left. She did not report the assault—in the mid 1970s there was no provision for the care of sexual assault survivors in our town.
This woman went to her family doctor, she told me, because her period was late. He told her that she shouldn’t worry—that she was still recovering from the trauma of what had happened to her. A month later she still hadn’t started her period and she returned to that doctor and requested a pregnancy test. He told her not to worry, and didn’t order the test. The third time he did what she wanted, and the test was positive. If I were she, I would be terrified of her coworker and outraged at the doctor.
There are three lessons here: Even good doctors are fallible. Pregnancy is common after rape, even though there is a false belief that it is rare. Do-it-yourself pregnancy tests are a good idea.
When I was in medical school the only pregnancy test involved injecting an animal with a sample of the woman’s urine—and waiting a couple of days for the result.
Tests had improved a few years later when I was in general practice. We had kits that the nurse would use. As I remember, it took a half hour for the test to develop, so we’d often call the patient when the result was available. Unfortunately, a positive result looked different with different brands of tests. When we switched brands we misinterpreted a few tests and made some embarrassed calls. “I’m sorry to say that what I told you yesterday was wrong. Your test result is negative, not positive.”
Now you can get tests at the store that are inexpensive, sensitive and quite accurate. We can thank Margaret Crane, a product designer at Organon who designed the first at-home test. It became available in 1971 in Canada, but not until 1977 in the USA.
What caused the lag in making it available in this country? The (male) executives of her company didn’t trust women to do their own tests. There might also have been some pressure from the medical community to not give up the income from pregnancy testing. This innovation required a woman with imagination, artistic ability and faith in womenkind to make the first model of a home pregnancy test.
Another heroine of reproductive health just died. Sharon Camp earned a doctorate in foreign relations, then spent years in D.C. as a lobbyist. She learned that Emergency Contraceptive Pills (ECPs) were available in Europe, but not in the USA. This seemed wrong to her, and she lobbied drug manufacturers to sell ECPs, but without success. Although she had no background in the pharmaceutical business, she started her own company to market Plan B, the first ECP in the USA.
At first the FDA required a prescription for Plan B. I told the local pharmacies that I was available to call in that prescription, and did so many times for women whom I never met. Later Camp lobbied the FDA successfully to make ECPs available without a prescription to women over a certain age, and eventually to women without any age limit.
Neither Crane nor Camp had medical training. However, both realized a need and were able to find a way to help women get the care they wanted. They found ways to lower barriers to reproductive health care.
©Richard Grossman MD, 2025